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After a petition that garnered over 1,000 signatures, a 42-page denaming request, and almost two years of deliberation by a University committee, Harvard finally announced this summer that it would be renaming John Winthrop House to… Winthrop House.

The decision is the sort of moderation likely to please neither side of the debate. The choice seemed binary — either dename the house or leave it be. I myself had previously written that Winthrop House should be denamed fully. But instead, the Review Committee did something I — and I imagine many others — couldn’t have anticipated: keeping the Winthrop family name while trimming the specific reference to “John” Winthrop.

As unconventional and unpopular as this decision may be, it provides us the perfect opportunity to remember and reflect on — rather than erase — Harvard’s history.

To give a quick crash course: Winthrop House was named after the John Winthrop who served as a professor and acting president of Harvard. Not to be confused with his great-great-grandfather, also named John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Among other controversies, both of them enslaved people.

Interestingly, the Review Committee showed that the house was intended to be named only for the younger Winthrop, not his ancestor — even though the governor did serve on Harvard’s Board of Overseers.

Harvard’s relationship with the Winthrops is twofold. There is the initial relationship — i.e., their respective services as an acting president and overseer for Harvard. The relationship I find more important, however, is the fact that over one hundred years after both of them had died, Harvard decided to name a house after the younger Winthrop.

While Harvard shouldn’t simply honor either man, the University’s historic relationship with the family shouldn’t be forgotten either — especially because that family included enslavers who Harvard honored anyway.

Winthrop is not the only name worth remembering. University President A. Lawrence Lowell, who created the undergraduate house system, tried to limit the number of Jewish students, remove Black students from University housing, and persecute gay students. President Charles W. Eliot was a eugenicist. President Increase Mather enslaved at least one person. So did important members of the Leverett and Dudley families.

Though some reference relatives rather than the actual offenders, when the University established houses with these names in the 1930s and beyond, it was choosing which legacies to honor. We should remember — not simply efface — these individuals’ horrific actions, especially those done in Harvard’s name.

There’s a laundry list of other buildings on campus with complicated namesakes — the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Wigglesworth Hall, Stoughton Hall, and Agassiz Theater come to mind. They, too, must be reckoned with.

We should also extend this scrutiny to more recent decisions. The entire Graduate School of Arts and Sciences is named for Republican megadonor Kenneth C. Griffin ’89. Just last year, the Kennedy School named a professorship after Henry A. Kissinger ’50. Harvard’s present may not be far less controversial than its past.

One thing is clear: The University has a lot of complicated history — history that it has chosen to honor time and time again. How can we deal with these disappointing realities? By remembering them.

As the nation’s oldest, richest, and putatively best university, Harvard has housed many of the world’s most impactful leaders — good and bad. It’s no surprise, then, that it has been directly connected to many of the country’s gravest sins as well.

Harvard should teach its students about its foundation and legacy, not only so that we remember these atrocities, but also so that we consider our place as current students at the University.

If we dename buildings, it makes it substantially harder to remember these uncomfortable but important truths. Consider Harvard Law School’s seal. It was originally the crest of the Royall family, who reaped wealth from enslaved labor and donated money to establish Harvard’s first law professorship.

In 2021, the Royall shield was replaced with what I can only describe as a gaudy, modernist, corporate logo — not that aesthetics should be our main consideration. Despite the Law School’s assurance that the new shield has symbolism, it is personally hard for me to identify anything meaningful.

No longer will students wonder why the shield displays three bushels of wheat — and organically discover the troubling history of the Royall family. Instead, they must seek out or stumble upon the library exhibit to learn the story behind the former shield.

While an exhibit is a good way to preserve our history, I don’t imagine Harvard will create a museum for all of its institutional failings anytime soon, at least not in this political climate. (Just look at the layoffs in the Slavery Remembrance Program.)

But in the meantime, perhaps the silver lining of Winthrop’s “non-denaming denaming” is that we can each remember what Harvard used to — and still chooses to — honor.

Matthew R. Tobin ’27, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a double concentrator in Government and Economics in Winthrop House.